PUBLIC LIVES; Proud Daughter of a Janitor Reaches an Academic Peak

THE two sisters moved speechlessly through the Georgian revival house on Power Street, the official residence of the president of Brown University.

As they stepped across the marble entranceway, noted the three fireplaces and walked around the sunny conservatory, they thought of their first house: a corrugated tin shack perched on blocks on an East Texas farm where their father, a father of 12, was a tenant farmer.

''The overall impression is one of disbelief that in a lifetime one can travel so far,'' said Ruth J. Simmons, 55, the younger of the two women, who learned this week that she would be given the keys to that house, to say nothing of the 236-year-old Brown campus in Providence, R.I., on July 1. ''We were a little numb thinking about it.''

Taking in the breadth of the campus on Thursday with her sister Marie Raymond, a mother of two grown children who is now majoring in English at Mount Holyoke College, Dr. Simmons was struck by the irony. Here she was, the great-grandchild of at least one slave on her mother's side, preparing to lead one of the world's most prestigious universities.

''So many of those buildings go back to the early period of American history,'' Dr. Simmons said in an interview. ''I was contrasting where my ancestors would have been when Brown was founded and what their lives would have been like and how insignificant they would have been to society at that time.''

Dr. Simmons climbed to the pinnacle of the American academy by way of a $1,000 scholarship to Dillard University in New Orleans, a Fulbright fellowship, administrative posts at Princeton University and Spelman College, and most recently, the presidency of Smith College. But she says it is impossible to disentangle what she has become from who she is and what she has experienced.

And if there is any lesson to be learned from her being named the first black president of an Ivy League institution, she says it is that the scars of her life, and its triumphs, can surely serve as a living example to others.

For example, Dr. Simmons, who wears dark St. John knit suits and doesn't own a pair of jeans, has been followed around department stores by clerks who seem convinced she is about to shoplift something -- an experience not unlike those recounted by countless other black and Hispanic Americans.

Dr. Simmons says she has been under surveillance in Bloomingdale's, Saks Fifth Avenue and Ferragamo in New York, and, just a couple of weeks ago, in the gift shop of a hotel in Syracuse, where, she says, she apparently lingered too long near a sprawling display of Beanie Babies.

It is a story she intends to tell her new students at Brown.

''If we could get a cadre of leaders who are bold enough and courageous enough and intelligent enough to intercept some of these practices, we could make a change in society,'' Dr. Simmons says. ''It's conceivable that one of these students might be the chief executive officer of one of those stores one day.''

Those trying to get a handle on her style of administration should examine her role in the hiring of the author Toni Morrison as a professor at Princeton in 1988.

Ms. Morrison had just written the novel ''Beloved,'' and Dr. Simmons, the acting director of the department of Afro-American studies and an associate dean of the faculty, thought that Princeton should lure the author away from the State University of New York at Albany. There was only one problem: the search committee insisted that Ms. Morrison provide a curriculum vitae, and Ms. Morrison angrily refused, saying that her work should serve as its own resume.

Rather than ask one side to back down, Dr. Simmons devised her own solution: she interviewed Ms. Morrison's secretary, gathered a sheaf of newspaper clippings and wrote the author's resume herself.

''I didn't think the committee was being unreasonable, and neither was she,'' Dr. Simmons said. ''It was just a matter of resolving this in a fairly straightforward way.''

Ms. Morrison, who has taught at Princeton ever since, said she did not learn of Dr. Simmons's backstage efforts until a reporter told her yesterday.

''In the work she does, the easy thing is to mishandle power,'' Ms. Morrison said in an interview. ''But to have someone come from those circumstances is to have someone who knows what power is for, for enabling people.''

WHEN Dr. Simmons has ruffled feathers, especially among students, it has usually been because of her insistence that they use proper diction and scrap the ''likes'' and ''ums'' that have been part of their lexicon since childhood.

If she dwells on the subject a little long, perhaps it is because her own schooling was far from the minds of her mother, who cleaned houses, and father, who left farming to become a janitor at a Houston jelly factory. Neither passed beyond the eighth grade.

''They were barely eking out a living,'' says Dr. Simmons, a divorced mother of a grown son and daughter. ''They wanted us to live to adulthood. They wanted us to be close to each other. They wanted us to be decent human beings.''

Those students who have found Dr. Simmons a little stiff would be surprised to learn that behind the facade of a classical music lover beats the heart of someone whose fantasy is to be Tina Turner. Seriously.

''I can just see myself dancing up there on stage, with the best legs,'' Dr. Simmons says. ''On occasion I like to shock people.''